Liberty Alone

I’ve just read an interesting article from the Journal of Liberal History about Arthur Seldon, a founding member of the IEA and at the time Liberal activist. In those days, the IEA was seen as a Liberal Party front by some sectors, the Liberals embracing economic liberalism which was at the party’s core from the very beginning.

Its a funny twist that the party which kept economic liberalism alive throughout the 20th century, when both the Conservatives and Labour parties favoured the corporate state now treats any talk of economic liberalism as dangerous Tory-talk, despite the fact that the Tories never embraced economic liberalism and have now fallen back to their default state of corporatism and entrenchment of privilege.

Interesting snippets concern the fact that there was a debate in the 1960s within the Liberal Party about education and health vouchers, and Beveredge being concerned about the way the welfare state was starting to take over the non-governmental means of support which had developed.

Its sad now that vouchers are a taboo subject in the mainstream of the party, being used as a slur in the recent leadership election, and the consensus is to try and keep the governmental near-monopoly (a real monopoly for the poor) on welfare.

We could learn a lot from looking back beyond the 1970s and 80s when it comes to the party’s economic position. I wonder whether the party as a whole actually still supports free trade, let alone the more radical proposals from the party’s past.
Economic liberalism should be central to any liberal program, it originates as an attack on privilege, we need to rediscover those aspects and promote them, recovering economic liberalism from the other parties who have perverted it to try and entrench privilege or give favours to their preferred supporters.

I hope the party will rediscover the Liberal heritage in economic liberalism, there’s some signs that things will move in this direction, at least the debate is starting to be had.

Over at Charlotte Gore’s blog Matthew Huntbach launches yet another attack on markets in education.

This time he fails to understand the difference between the pressure to achieve centrally set targets and to provide services (or products) people desire.

He says:

The reality is that school teachers actually feel under intense competitive pressures to do whatever it is to drive their schools up the league tables, and this is having a negative rather than a positive effect on education.

I agree that teachers are under pressure to push the school further up the league table. However, this is pressure to conform to outside imposed targets. In a market, the pressure is to create what people actually want, not what some government department thinks people should want.

The current situation is like trying to meet this month’s quota for tractor production. Its an arbitrary target which has little to do with what is actually desired or needed.

In a market the pressure is to produce something which enough people want to make it worthwhile. So whilst some people want tractors, they will want different things from their tractors. Different companies can specialise in different types of tractor, or they could divert their energy and capital to the production of a different type of farm machinery for which there is a demand.

Thus, competition is driven not by government targets and trying to do best at them, but by the demands of the customer, and the customers are not a homogeneous group with the same desires and expected outcome.
Schools would then be able to specialise. Some people may prefer a school which gets very high grades at GCSE above any other considerations. Others may prefer a school which has a broader focus, or which specialises in a particular subject area. There are any number of considerations.

If I look at my experience. I was lucky enough to go to a private school (thanks to sacrifices by my parents and later the generosity of charity, the school and my own savings). The reason my parents were willing to pay so much? Because the local schools would not have given me an education which was suitable for me (and they were both teachers in the borough so they knew this very well).
When looking at schools, the one we chose was not chosen over exam results, it was chosen because of the whole atmosphere and ethos.
I assume other pupils and parents preferred the other school for their own reasons.

Of course, the school did not suit everyone, there were several people who did not respond well to the academic atmosphere (despite being very intelligent). They would have benefited from an even greater choice of schools.

Something which occurred to me is that the difference between what people call Social and Economic Liberalism often comes down to the degree of faith you have in the state.

I have very little faith in the ability of the state to produce good outcomes (let alone the best ones) so I look to the state having a minimal role, which puts me in the ‘economic liberal’ camp.
People who tend to have more faith in the state tend to be more interventionist and are generally thought of as ’social liberals’.

This could also be characterised as a faith, or lack of, in markets, us ‘economic liberals’ like markets (so long as they’re sensible ones), but there’s a great deal more skepticism about them from ’social liberals’.

The key thing however is that most liberals share common aims. Individual freedom first of all, but as a step to that things like a good education for all, equality before the law, access to information, a political system which prevents accumulation of large amounts of power etc.
How those are provided really brings out the debate.